Dedicated to getting to the truth of things. A Christian since 1984. (Just a Christian, without pigeon-holing into a denomination.) I like people to be free to ask their questions about Christianity and the church. I like to approach faith questions with my brain switched on. A qualified classicist and historian.
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And I don't look like James Garner. Enough about me already.

Sunday, 1 May 2016

What Paul says about the earthly pre-resurrection Jesus – a summary list

I have often
heard, from non-historians, a claim that St Paul knew nothing about a human Jesus,
only a heavenly Jesus. This time around, instead of setting out background information as I’ve
done elsewhere, this blog is just a summary list for easy reference (since the claim
often comes up). (This blog collects into one place – in shorter form –
material from across some of my other blogs.)

So: of the
things Paul was taught about the earthly human Jesus, which does he mention in
his letters?

In answering
that question, I’m relying here only on letters which are generally undisputed
as authentic by secular scholars, letters written by Paul around the 50s of the
first century within about two decades of when Jesus is said to have died.

Some
selected things Paul gives us:

Jesus’
birth (out of a woman, he says, with no mention of a human father - Paul does
not give names of parents – neither his own nor, unsurprisingly therefore,
Jesus’ parents)

Jesus’
location (Judea)

Jesus’
childhood included having brothers and being in a family of observant Jews

Paul
also references moral teachings in a way consistent with someone who knew they
were Jesus’ teachings

he
also references Jesus’ apocalyptic views in a similar way

he
mentions Jesus’ betrayal (although he does not care to name his betrayer, just
as he mentions ‘the twelve’ without bothering to name most of them)

Paul
calls Jesus the 'Son of Adam', which in
Hebrew of course is exactly the same as 'Son
of Man' (ben-'adam), the
name by which Jesus called himself

Some of
those things are unpacked more below.

Timeline – life story of Jesus

Following
the timeline of Jesus’ life, I pick out the following from those letters by
Paul:

Jesus’ genealogy and birth

•Jesus was an Israelite and he was
descended from the family of King David (Romans 1:3).

Indeed: "To them [the Jews] belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Messiah" (Romans 9:5)

•Jesus arrived ‘out of a woman’
(Gal 4:4), so was undoubtedly a human with a mother as far as Paul was
concerned!

Family and
upbringing

•Jesus was born into a family of
observant Jews (that is clear because he was born under the Jewish law, which Jews
call the Torah) (Galatians 4:4).

•In his biological family, Jesus
had a brother named James (Gal 1:19), and he had other brothers (who had wives
– 1 Corinthians 9:5).

•Jesus’ life was in the first half
of the first century.

oPaul was writing in the 50s of
the first century (the date is calculated from dating information in Paul's
letters), and
Jesus' brothers were adults with wives and clearly still alive in the 50s: this
means Jesus' life can be dated to the first half of the first century.

Jesus’
ministry

•Jesus had a ministry specifically
to Israelites: "Christ became a servant of the Jews" (Romans 15:8-9). Again, to be clear, this is a human Jesus ministering to fellow Israelites as a member of their race: "To them [the Jews] belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Messiah" (Romans 9:5)

Jesus’
Passion Week (the last week of his life)

•Jesus spent time in the land of
the Judeans, homeland of Israelites, and this is where he died (1 Thessalonians
2:15).

•Jesus was betrayed at night-time,
during a gathering which extended from before supper till after supper, at
which Jesus handled some of the food and a cup (1 Cor 11:23).

•Some people of Judea caused
Jesus’ death (1 Thess 2:15): “You suffered from your own countrymen the same
things those churches [in Judea] suffered from the Judeans, who killed the Lord
Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out.” –

oThat’s a bit of a scrapbook of
incidents – the sufferings in Judea of churches and Jesus and Paul and his
friends, as well as ancient prophets who Paul drags into the subject!

•Jesus’ death was by crucifixion
(1 Cor 2:8), which means the execution was carried out by the Romans (Paul
would have known that it was the Romans, not Jews, who practised crucifixion in
Judea).

In addition,
Paul says other things about Jesus that you would expect him to say if he were
talking about a human Jesus. (Whether you choose to believe Paul here is
describing the pre-resurrection Christ, or the post-resurrection Christ (or
both!), we can't say that the sort of comments that should be made about the
personality of a real person are totally missing - they're not.) So Paul speaks
of:

Jesus’ personality

servant – and this
was towards circumcised people (that is to say, Jews) (Romans 15:3, 8)

Jesus chose a life
of poverty, and Paul describes Jesus as meek and gentle (2
Corinthians 8:9; 10:1

Jesus having disciples

'the
twelve' (1 Cor 15:5). Paul just assumes that the reader knows what he means by
'the twelve'.

Jesus’
apocalyptic teachings

•In 1
Thessalonians 4:15, Paul starts off declaring stuff "in the word of the
Lord". Whatever "in the word of the Lord" means, what Paul says
next does actually align with the apocalyptic teaching of the gospels'
Jesus. Thus:

1 Thess 4:15-16 = Matthew 24:31
(note the mention of the trumpet)

1 Thess 4:17 = Matthew 25:5-7
(note the mention of meeting Jesus)

1 Thess 5:3-7 = Matthew
24:42-43 (note the mention of the thief in the night)

Jesus’ moral
teachings

•In 1 Corinthians,
repeatedly when Paul says he has a teaching from the Lord, it does actually
align with the gospels' Jesus. So:

1 Cor 7:10-11 = Mark 10:9-12
(on marriage and divorce)

1 Cor 9:14 = Luke 10:7 (on
labourers for the Lord being paid)

There is a general alignment too with a good deal of Jesus' ethical
teaching, and it is striking that out of all the alternatives in Paul's world,
this finds its way into his letters. So in Romans:

Romans 12:14 = Matthew 5:44

Romans 12:17 = Matthew 5:38-48

Romans 13:7 = Mark 12:17

Romans 13:8 = Mark 12:31

Romans 14:13 = Mark 9:42

Romans 14:14 = Mark 7:15

Romans 14:20 = Mark 7:19

One thing you may have noticed is that these are not
haphazard scatterings of teachings in Paul’s letters. They come in packages
such as 1 Thess 4-5 and Romans 12-14. They are known to Paul as chunks of
teaching. Glen Miller provides more example here.

Conclusions

Taking all the above together,
to claim as if it were a fact that Paul knew nothing about the earthly Jesus
would be sheer ignorance. Paul is an important secondary source on the
historical Jesus, and our earliest. He was a contemporary of Jesus who was
writing within about two decades of Jesus’ death, which is nothing really. And
his sources weren’t bad: he knew Jesus’ brother James, and also Peter and John
– people reputed to be eyewitnesses of the historical Jesus. Which is why Paul
is an important secondary witness to Jesus. Historians of ancient history deal
with secondary sources all the time – they are bread and butter of a
historians’ work, along with primary sources.